Juan José Millás*

She’s Everywhere

When my second marriage collapsed, I knew that it marked the end of my romantic biography. In future, I might have a few semi-passionate affairs, but there was bound to be something artificial, something false about all of them, completely at odds with the degree of commitment that, in my view, was necessary to sustain any long-term relationship. I hate to generalize, but men are very strange, by which I mean that they lack emotions or are more or less incapable of communicating them. They relate best to objects – a car, a gold watch, a leatherbound diary, a credit card – and it may be that, through them, they’re trying to say things too profound for us women to understand; we, on the other hand, have a much closer relationship with the abyss, with the void, with absence. You can’t have a conversation about life with a man or, if you do, there’s always something rather coarse or vulgar about his words, and that fills me with a kind of atavistic revulsion of which I’ve tried in vain to cure myself. It’s funny, because when you see fathers with their daughters, they do seem to develop genuinely tender feelings for them, as if they were their ideal girlfriends or something. As I say, all this is a massive generalization; there are men capable of peering into the abyss on the edge of which we women sit permanently perched, although I’ve yet to meet such a man, and am unlikely to do so at this stage in my life. Anyway, I’m not prepared to hang around waiting for such a rare event to happen.

Not that my relationships with other women have been easy either. I seem to arouse feelings of intense rivalry in them, and, while I found this rather flattering when I was younger, I absolutely loathe it now. So I don’t have any close women friends either, and, of course, none with whom I could consider sharing my life. That’s why, when my second husband left me, I began to embrace solitude in the belief that, in future, this would be the norm. I quickly acquired the habits of a singleton, little routines with which I gradually fortified my existence, until I had come to a proper understanding with the walls of my apartment and with my sheets, and, generally speaking, this worked very well until, that is, I met Julia.

I met her in a café where we both used to have lunch. The first time I saw her and our eyes met, I knew there was something about her that touched me deeply. We only had to exchange a few words for that disquieting feeling to be confirmed, a feeling that continued to grow apace in the weeks that followed. It was the beginning of autumn and I was beset by a vague but persistent melancholy, which found meaning and direction in Julia’s company. I began to depend on her, but without having to pay the high price that comes with depending on a man. I would never have dared say this to her, but I felt as if she were a part of my being that had long ago been plucked from me, leaving a subtle wound that had now found sweet relief.

Meanwhile, autumn was sliding into winter, and I was beginning to think of life as a home in which the evening was the most pleasant room to sit in. I even began to lose my fear of Sundays and rediscovered the old pleasure of going for walks alone and viewing myself from the outside as if I were some kind of spectacle, like a flame that would burn for a finite, but unknown period of time. On rainy days, I would take refuge in a café and enjoy watching people crossing the street, dodging the cars and the puddles, in order to go nowhere at all, like in those nature programmes where the animals wander from one place to another with no apparent objective, but with admirably precise movements.

Julia began to come to my apartment on a fairly regular basis. We would spend the evenings talking about things that didn’t concern us directly, avoiding delving into any personal matters, not out of respect for what is usually called ‘privacy’, but rather because it seemed unnecessary to indulge in such exhibitionism. Meanwhile, our relationship grew imperceptibly, building between us a bridge connecting the two parts of a single country split in two by some catastrophe.

One day, I remember, it snowed and, from the living-room window, I saw Julia get off the bus and run over to the street door below. Her feet were soaked, and I had to lend her a pair of woollen socks and some slippers that fitted her perfectly. Then I made some tea, and as it began to grow dark, and using the cold weather as an excuse, we each drank a glass of brandy.

‘Would you like to stay for supper?’ I asked.

‘Well, if the weather carries on like this,’ she said with a smile, ‘I’ll have to stay the night.’

‘There’s plenty of room,’ I said, trying not to betray my feelings.

She asked me to show her some photos, and I brought out the various albums that summarize my life. I’m not a particularly organized person, but, when it comes to photos, I’ve developed a kind of mania, with an eye to the future. I’ve arranged the photos according to the date and the event they commemorate, and under each one I’ve written a few lines summing up how I was feeling when the photo was taken. We sat at the small, round table I’d recently placed in the living room, opposite the window, and we began turning the thick leaves of the first album, while, on the other side of the window that was keeping us safe from the harsh world outside, the snow continued to fall in indolent flakes. I think it must have been the brandy – which I hardly ever drink – that encouraged me to talk.

‘This is me at my first communion.’

‘Why so serious?’

‘My mother had told me not to smile because I had two teeth missing.’

‘And who’s that?’

She was pointing to a girl the same age as me standing to the right of the photo, in profile, observing me with a kind of ironic aloofness, as if she disapproved of my dress or my hairband or my general attitude to the whole occasion. But I didn’t know who that girl was, I never have, just as I’ve never been able to identify another girl (possibly the same one) who is there in a school photo observing me from one corner, as if disapproving of the special sash I’m wearing. I couldn’t help myself then and I shared my first confidence with Julia.

‘Look,’ I said, focusing my gaze on the album, ‘that girl gets everywhere. She’s always different, but she’s always looking at me as if reproaching me for something, or mocking me.’

Indeed, throughout my whole photographic career, at all the most important events in my life, you can see a girl growing up at the same rate as me and who is always there, in one corner, eyeing me impertinently. I noticed her recently, one Saturday evening when I was adding dates to my latest albums. I asked my mother and my siblings if they could identify the woman who appears in the photos of both my first and my second wedding, in the photo taken during my first trip abroad, or on my birthday, but no one knew who she was. I only know that she’s observing me, sometimes affectionately, but almost always with a hint of sadness, as might the most disillusioned part of my own self.

And while I was explaining all this to Julia, trying to avoid her eyes, her smile, I knew that this same woman was now sitting next to me, contemplating my life, while the snow continued to cut us off from the world, sealing a pact that would bind us together for ever now that we’d finally met each other outside a photo. The brandy was warming my veins, and in the next-door apartment I could hear the music of the cutlery being irritably plonked down on the table for the family supper. And Julia said that, yes, she would definitely stay the night.

So there we are.